Any discussion of the background art throughout the specification should in no way be considered as an admission that such art is widely known or forms part of common general knowledge in the field.
The need for accurate sensing is an important resource in modern society. Sensing of changes in electric field strengths and analogues thereto is a significant undertaking.
For example, one of the most important aspects of the large scale electricity power distribution cycle is the ability to measure the quantity and quality of the energy for each point of interest. There is therefore a high importance to provide a low cost and high-accuracy voltage measurement technique for high power distribution systems.
Today's current and voltage sensing technology, such as those described in the aforementioned reference to Sanders et al., are based on a complex, large and expensive electrical approach.
A number of fibre optic based current and voltage sensors, for example, those due to Laming et al, have been proposed but have had limited commercial success due to complexity and high cost.
It would be desirable to provide for direct electric field measurement of fields up to say 400 kV/m electric fields at multiple (distributed) points.
Sensing is also important in other environments. In particular pressure sensing in water (hydrophones and sonars), monitoring of flow of gases and fluids (such as water or oil related products) in pipelines, monitoring of corrosion and detection of the presence of particular gases in atmosphere are highly relevant.